The image is seared in my head. The man appears to be in his 40s, attending a Trump-Pence rally during the 2016 presidential campaign. He is wearing a “Make America Great” cap and a dark T-shirt. Emblazoned on the back of the shirt are six words: Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some Assembly Required.

You might just slough it off as a rhetorical anti-press joke. But now, two years into the Trump mess, it’s increasingly difficult to laugh. With four journalists killed last year in Annapolis, Md., and the recent murder of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey, the U.S. is Number 4 in the world on the Committee to Protect Journalists’ annual survey of attacks on the press.

“Things have really deteriorated,” Courtney Radsch, the advocacy director at CPJ, told me. “So many things are arrayed against journalists. They are now in an unprivileged position.”

Which, of course, is not only terrifying to the democracy but is exactly what the First Amendment to the Constitution was meant to protect — the privileged ability of a free press to collect information about those in power and feed it to a starving public. Enlightened citizens don’t come out of thin air. They’re nurtured by society’s glue and lubricant — the press.

And it is not just in America that the press is under fire. Authoritarians abroad have long sought to silence critics. But Radsch says attacks on the press are up 50 percent.This year 47 journalists have been killed (324 over the last decade). And you can’t blame that on this President, can you? Dr. Radsch disagrees.

“We have always had a world with competing interests,” she observes, “but the balance came with respect for press freedom — typically with the United States taking the lead. What is different is American abdication of leadership of global norms” on press freedom.

Words really do matter. For example, since Day 1 of his Administration, the president has gone after “fake news,” which boils down to any news that makes him look bad. When journalists reported on the paucity of his inauguration crowds, the attacks on the press began. And authoritarians worldwide have followed.

Radsch says laws punishing journalists for “fake news” have cropped up all over the world since Trump’s attacks, oddly France and Germany among them. Laws criminalizing “fake news” went from two in 2016 to six in 2018, and from nine journalists in prison to 21.

“Governments have all stepped up. They have learned very quickly,” she points out, with the Internet the new target for monitoring and censorship.

The First Amendment in America, of course, prevents such censorship but Trump is trying other avenues. Jim Acosta, the CNN White House correspondent, had his press credentials revoked because the president didn’t like the tone of his questions. A federal judge blocked the president.

And for good reason. The First Amendment means the government cannot discriminate because it doesn’t like a point of view. And while the White House said Acosta’s boorish behavior was why his press pass was revoked, clearly he was penalized because Trump didn’t like his reporting. Viewpoint discrimination.

“The founders of our country knew there would be tension between our leaders and our journalists,” says Katie Townsend, Legal Director for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. “In fact, they designed our system that way, knowing that a free and assertive press is the best defense against tyranny.”

Don’t get me wrong. Playing hardball is not illegal — freezing reporters out of announcements, giving exclusives to friendly journalists (hello Sean Hannity!), even criticizing reporting — all longtime staples of White House behavior. But it does violate the spirit of the First Amendment, which is to help the press gather information and enable self-government. It’s not required, just desirable. Punishing journalists, however, is unconstitutional

The Acosta incident is trivial compared to Khashoggi, a Saudi Arabian-born journalist who criticized his native land and was then murdered (his body cut into pieces while he was in the Saudi embassy in Turkey). There is a tape recording of the grisly murder.

But the president, unswayed by the evidence, says it’s more important to protect ongoing financial deals with the Saudis than to stand up for press freedom and lambast the Saudis. “To have the verbal weighing of monetary value against a journalist’s life, to not even give lip service to the importance of press freedom is deeply disturbing,” says Radsch.

Be clear, the press is a watchdog, not the enemy. Sometimes it observes, joining conversations and mediating the craziness of our world. Sometimes it starts the discussion and at times, increasingly, it weighs in, telling readers, viewers, web surfers what to think. But sometimes the press also muckrakes, digging beneath the obvious, and finding deep corruption.

This president doesn’t understand that such scrutiny is not only unavoidable but that it’s what we wanted from our press. Pick your word: gadfly, pesky, snoop, contrarian — and reporter. But always they report back to the people, they’re responsible to the people, not the President.

Peter Keisler, an acting attorney general in the Bush Administration, argues that a “free press and public criticism should be encouraged, not attacked. These are values that might once have been thought so universally accepted that they didn’t need defending, but that’s no longer the case.”

Recently deceased President George Bush told Bill Clinton in 1993 as he entered the White House: “There will be very tough times made even more difficult by criticism you may not think is fair…. just don’t let the critics push you off course.” President Trump’s solution is not to beat his critics at their own game, but to beat them up.

First the president called reporters “the enemy of the people.” Then he applauded a congressman who body-slammed a journalist. And now he waves off cold-blooded murder of a journalist whose government did not like his opinion. The Constitution and the federal courts will keep putting Donald Trump in his place, but the Congress needs to move now to find a new place for him – out of our White House

Rob Miraldi’s First Amendment writings have won state and national awards. He teaches journalism at SUNY New Paltz and is the author of Seymour Hersh: Scoop Artist. Twitter @miral98 and e-mail miral98@aol.com.